A couple of weeks ago, a Harvard professor held up an innocuous looking scrap of ancient paper with writing on it and said that it was 1,700 years old. No bigger than a business card, it was a fragment of one of the myriad gospels which never made it into the Bible. Written in Coptic (that would be the language of the Ethiopian and Egyptian Christians), it mentioned Jesus’ wife. 

No doubt you heard about the terrible riots in Rome, the deaths in London, the violence in Paris and the gangland style slayings in this country, all protesting this blasphemous outrage.

No doubt you did not hear anything like that, because it never happened. Christians are not Muslims and we tend not to riot over perceived insults to our faith. Yet, we do something almost as ridiculous — we give credence, or believability, to such an outlandish notion that Jesus had a wife. One could just see the academic world and the news media and a lot of other people as well saying to themselves, “Perhaps what the Harvard professor has in her possession is the real deal, and Jesus was married, and that’s just going to turn Christianity on its head and get those clerics to change the Church’s outmoded views on sexuality, etc., etc.”

For a while that worked, but then cooler heads prevailed. There were real problems with this fragment of a renegade gospel. It was written hundreds of years after Jesus lived, died and rose again. Nowhere else is there any record of Jesus having been married. If he was, we would have known about it. One of the most interesting things about early Christianity is that its leadership was not kept within the immediate family. Outside of St. James, bishop of Jerusalem and related to Jesus, no other family member makes it to the top of the leadership. Had Jesus been married and fathered children, he would have started a dynasty and as is often the case, the leadership of his group would have remained in “the family.”

Harvard University backed down and reneged on its promise to publish the academic paper about this fragment. Even the secularists realized they were about to be made to look like fools. The Vatican pronounced it a fraud, but the secularists smiled just a bit. Once again they had succeeded in chipping away at our orthodox faith.

We don’t understand the fury that drives the Muslim backlash against any kind of criticism of Mohammed, but we shouldn’t feel that superior. It is just as naive and foolish to swallow secular researchers and misguided anthropologists who insist on making Jesus just an ordinary guy.

He is not. He is truly God and truly human.

People’s curiosity about whether Jesus could have had a relationship with Mary Magdalene is indeed blasphemous but it says more about our need to make God into our image and likeness and take away our responsibility for any kind of sexual ethic.

Did Jesus have a girlfriend, did he have a wife, did he have children? No, no and no! But he had a lot of other things, like the answers to life and death, a roadmap to stay centered on the highway to heaven, a Church that was made of his followers, sacraments that enabled him to be present even after he died for many, and finally, he had the ability to bestow the gift of eternal life. The West may not do riots like the Muslims, but sometimes we exhibit a silliness in our faith that is just as dangerous.